Chattering deficit with the mother can lead to anorexia

The lack of a good and reliable connection with the mother in the first years of life can lead to serious disorders in the mental development of the child. Including disorders of food behavior, bulimia and anorexia.

“… I just don’t want to eat, no appetite. I do not like lies, pretense, I do not like it when they avoid something. I would like to talk to my parents so much, tell them about themselves and listen to them about them what childhood they had, how they look at the world today. They never talked about it. They constantly tried to instill in me good manners and avoided all personal. I am tired of this”.

“Mom is worried, as always. She puts all her activity only in experiences about me, and it

infuriates me. I am afraid that I can’t eat again if she continues in the same spirit, because the way she talks to me is interrupting her appetite.

If I want to meet Monika, she says that a friend communicates with drug addicts. If I talk on the phone with Klaus, she says that he has only girls on his mind and he causes her suspicion. If I talk with Aunt Anna, I see that she is jealous of my sister, because I have me much more often.

I have a feeling that I should adapt and cut my life so that my mother does not break, so that everything is in order with her and that nothing is left of me. So depressed with your soul that nothing will remain of you so that your mother is calm and not afraid of ”.

These are lines from the hospital diary of 16-year-old Anita, who has lost weight to a life-threatening level. Her story tells in her book “The Body doesn’t Lying” Alice Miller.

Deadly dangerous ailment

Anorexia is considered a very complex mental illness, sometimes leading to death. Anorexia has many reasons, but the background is most often the same: disturbed child-child relationships. To understand this disease, writes Alice Miller, we must figure out what needs of the child were not satisfied, what emotional deficiency he experienced in the first years of his life.

According to Miller, it’s all about parental cruelty, which does not always take the form of beatings. It is also expressed in a lack of good care, in ignoring the needs of the child and his mental pain, in meaningless punishments, in sexual violence, in the exploitation of the child’s unconditional love, in the emotional blackmail, in the destruction of a sense of dignity and in countless forms of manifestation of power.

The worst thing is that the child takes all this for normal behavior, because he does not know the other. He unconditionally loves his parents, no matter what they do with him. But is it love? Miller believes that this is not love, but a painful destructive affection, consisting of fear and a sense of duty.

The child must suppress the memory of this violence and deny the pain in order to survive;Otherwise, he would be killed by pain. If the child was fed by a lie, if words and gestures hid the real rejection of the child, hatred, disgust, antipathy, then he can refuse to develop on such a “nutrition”. And in the future he risks suffering from anorexia, not understanding what kind of “food” he needs.